Scout is born!

On July 19, 2024, the Scout search engine platform launched! Check it out and find volunteer opportunities near you.

New Search Engine Revolutionizes How People Find Local Volunteering Opportunities

Samaritan Scout, the internet’s first and only search engine focused exclusively on volunteering, is revolutionizing how people find in-person volunteer opportunities. Powered by groundbreaking AI, Scout eliminates long-standing barriers for volunteers and nonprofits, connecting individuals with meaningful ways to make a difference in their communities.

As offline media becomes less available as a source of reliable information, people have been left with the newspaper-like technology of outdated directory-websites. These sites (Idealist, VolunteerMatch) require nonprofits to manually submit listings and push irrelevant paid listings (8:25 ratio of ads:postings), producing ‘search results’ that provide a narrow window into volunteer opportunities. 

Samaritan Scout changes this. By leveraging AI to scan and structure nonprofit websites’ data, Scout automates discovery, ensuring that even small organizations with simple websites are included.

The Most Comprehensive Volunteer Search Available

When potential volunteers search on Google using a few keywords and their location, they often face an overwhelming number of irrelevant results—with only one relevant opportunity for every 30–50 unrelated listings, many of which are hundreds of miles away. Directory websites like VolunteerMatch (Americorps’ selected partner) and Idealist offer only marginally better results.

For example, in Madison, Wisconsin, Samaritan Scout finds over 200 local opportunities, while VolunteerMatch and Idealist list just 61 (of which 30% are ‘featured’ ads, another 10% promote student exchange programs). In Summit, New Jersey, Scout identifies 22 volunteer activities, whereas directory websites find 2. Expanding the search area to a 5 mile radius, Scout uncovers 98 additional local opportunities, while directory sites return only 6.

How to Use Scout

By entering a location and any text (keyword, phrase, description), you set our AI-powered search engine in motion.

If you’d rather not specify an activity or cause, you can just enter a location and see what’s out there! In July, 2024, Scout’s locations were limited to the States of New York and New Jersey. A month later, we covered volunteering in Utah and Wisconsin, adding the Dakotas and Minnesota in the fall. By winter the DMV (Washington DC-Maryland-Virginia) and Seattle, Washington were added. By fall 2025, we anticipate covering the entire United States.

You can further filter the volunteer opportunities by adjusting a location radius:

You can also (multi!) select from our drop-down of Causes and Skills to hone in on the contribution you’d like to make.

Meet the Team Behind the Innovation

Samaritan Scout was co-founded by:

• Dvora Inwood, an experienced product leader and former educator, who shifted her focus to impact-driven technology after a Stage IV colon cancer diagnosis 2 years ago.
• Will Rosenthal, a Cornell University computer science student, who designed the back-end architecture and then led the AI-powered search engine’s development.

The platform was created by volunteers and interns:

• Wyatt Sell, full stack engineer, automated Scout’s data pipeline and integrated the back-end database with the front-end user interface, and then took on technical leadership for the platform 2024-2025. (Cornell ‘27)
• Pradhi Pakkerakari, backend data engineer, developed a large-scale web scraper and text refinement tool using AI (Cornell ‘27)
• Kavita Mahabaleshwarkar, UX, designed all the interface and graphic design elements of the platform as a professional volunteer, devoting countless hours while balancing full-time work and parenting!
• Jack Greenwald, frontend software developer who volunteered as a high school student (AIT ‘24, Northeastern ’28)
• Akash Dubey, frontend software developer who volunteered as a high school student (AIT ‘24, Rutgers ’28)
• Hongzhi (Ethan) Zhao, volunteer frontend software developer while completing a master’s program in Computer Science